[Prot] I'm tanking my first raid tonight and I'm feeling overwhelmed

[Deleted]

Hello fellow paladins. Apologies in advance if this kind of post isn't allowed.

Tonight I'm tanking HC HFC with my casual guild and I'm incredibly nervous. We've had to pug tanks the last two weeks so I volunteered to change from my hunter to my paladin. And now I've got decent gear but I'm still very uncomfortable when playing. I have a few quick questions that I hope you will answer for me:

• 1: What talents should I pick? Should I use Empowered Seals with my low gear or pick Holy Shield to make the whole thing easier? (I keep finding different answers to this question. I realize it's probably based on the fight and in a week or two I'm sure I'll know what to pick, but right now - not so much.)

• 2: Gearing - haste or mastery? (I've checked out a few well known paladins and, again, the info isn't consistent. There's some talk about the 50% haste cap but then some paladins enchant haste and have a few mastery gems without being at 50% with buffs. I'm not sure what to think.)

• 3: Is there a place where I can read some in-depth discussion about protection paladins? (When I played my hunter I would use Azortharion's guide which is almost always up to date. The icy-veins hunter forums are also very active but I'm having a hard time finding something similar for my paladin.)

These are the main things messing with my head lately. I don't have any paladin buddies I can talk to and I have absolutely no experience with the spec so I feel very overwhelmed. Please help me out. I'm excited to try out tanking and I think it's a excellent challenge - it's just a bit too much right now. I haven't had any time to practice and now I'm about to tank a real actual raid!

Regards,
Fudgedunker

Oh and my armory is: eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/kazzak/Fudgedunker/advanced (Can't post links yet, sorry)

[OrcsRLame]

For the important talent choices go Holy Shield, Light's Hammer, Unbreakable Spirit and Holy Avenger. Enchant/gem full haste. When tanking a boss, start off by popping Holy Avenger, spam your holy power generators as much as possible and mash shield of the righteous as fast as you can. When dealing with normal boss melee hits, use divine protection if you're not going to have sotr up for a few seconds. While divine protection is up, build up to 5 holy power then let your generators come up before hitting sotr, then spam like a motherfucker. Generally use Light's Hammer on cooldown, but it's acceptable to delay it for a few seconds if you're not really taking much damage and you could benefit more from the healing. When shit hits the fan, use ardent defender and/or guardian of ancient kings. If those are on CD and shit is hitting the fan anyway, call for an external cooldown from another raider. Ironbark from resto druids, pain suppression from disc priests, life cocoon from MW monks, hand of sacrifice from other paladins, guardian spirit from holy priests and vigilance from warriors. If you want to get extra fancy you can sometimes call for devo aura from holy paladins or PW: barrier from disc priests, or even spirit link totem, but your raid leader may get mad at you if those are important and already assigned for that fight. And for the love of god use 2 armor potions per fight. Use one before the pull and one during the fight. Don't be a pleb that doesn't prepot.

If you follow this simple wall of text guide, you'll automatically be a better tank than 99% of the tanks in this game. Prot pallies are a great class for scumbag dps though, so when you get more comfortable on fights there's nothing wrong with switching to Seraphim and/or Execution Sentence on some fights. Imo, Emp Seals is worthless this tier.

[Deleted]

Dont know when your raids are, but I'll be around on kazzak tonight around 2030 ST until late, you can poke me in game if you have any real time questions - perkyblonde